I do have reviews of quite a lot of professional software on this blog, but today, lets have a look at something focused more at the beginners and those, who don’t want to spend long time to learn how to do quick edits.

What is Fotojet?

Fotojet is an online photo editor and a collage maker. It works completely in your browser and you don’t have to install anything. You just upload your photos, do changes and download them back to you PC through your browser.

What can you do?

There are three main parts. Collage maker, Graphic designer and Photo editor. Each one is for when you are trying to do something a bit different.

Collage maker

As the name suggest, here you can make photo collages. You can choose from many basic layout and tweak them, or choose one of the more elaborate ones with photo backgrounds. Adding photos is easy and immediate, you just upload them from the PC or Facebook, and then just drag and drop them into the collage.

Graphic Designer

The Graphic Designer part is for creating posters, cards, promos and similar, already form predefined presets. It’s again as easy as drag and drop. You just choose the design you want, drag the photos into it to replace the example ones, and change the text and colors. That’s it.

Photo Editor

As the name suggest, this is the place to do photo editing. It goes from basics like Crop and Resize, up to Dehaze and Sharpen. You can also use the tools from the other two parts, and enhance the photos with Text, Clipart, Overlays and more.

All these parts are separate, so you can have a different photo opened in all of them at once. Also, If you want to be done quickly, you can use and auto-fill option for the collage and designs, that will just use random photos from the one you uploaded. Photojet allows to save your results in jpg or png file format.

Strangely I could not find how to add masks to images. You can use the ones that are already part of the presets, but you can’t make any new ones (or I really missed it somewhere).

Free vs. Paid

You may have noticed some small crowns on the screenshots. That marks the premium/paid content. Fotojet can be used completely for free, but some of the presets in collage and designer, and some of the advanced edits are limited for the paid customers. Still, especially in the collages and designer, you can do a lot for free. You pay only if you want any of the premium features.

How is it and when to use it

Fotojet is simple to use and easy to learn. The tools just popup by your cursor when you select something to edit, and while it offers quite a lot, it’s quite streamlined and not hard to get the hang off. It can take only seconds to create a new collage, or a new promo poster for you Facebook page.

I would not use it for some crazy elaborate photo editing, but if I had to suggest an easy way to create for instance blog banners, promotions, quick photo effects for someone with a blog, who is scared of Photoshop, I would show them this. Or if you just want to give a bit of flair or retro style to you Facebook posts. I even seen similar result to the ones I got here around the web, so it’s probably used a lot this way.

If you have not noticed it yet, I really like Kickstarter. One can find so many new and interesting stuff there. Always. And when one actually understands that it’s not an online store, it can be a lot of enjoyment seeing on how projects unfold.

But why I mention it today? It’s because I received a reward from one of my recently backed projects, Blilps.

What are Blips?

Blips are small microscopic lenses that you stick on the back of you smartphone, to radically change the magnification level you are getting. There are three lenses, a macro, micro and ultra, each one with different magnification. I got only the first two, as ultra was added later, and I did not change my pledge.

How to use them?

The lenses come in a tiny package, with few instructions. Not that you need anything more. To use the lens, you just unstick it from the package and stick it onto the phone camera. Hard to say how many times you can stick and unstick them, but the maybe 20 times I tried it worked fine. They held fine when directly on the phone, but on phone with a skin applied they tended to get loose.

There is a special camera app from the manufacturer, but you don’t really need it. The one thing that it does is to allow to lock focus, but you can get the exact same thing by just using manual focus in any other photo app.

So the best way to focus is not to use autofocus, but to lock the focus at one distance and then just move closer or further with the phone, until you get the focus you want. I personally had quite problems with this, as my hands just shake too much, and with such shallow DOF it’s easy to just move the phone by a tiny bit and loose the focus. Doing this from a holder or a small tripod would result in much better results. Also using a burst mode can help, as the phone takes many photos quickly, so you get shots with different planes of focus.

Macro & Micro

The focus distance for the macro lens is 10-12mm and micro is 6mm. That really is close. Depending on the camera position on your phone, it can result that you are shading your own subject.

Here are some of my results. All show a normal photo (around 10cm from the subject), a photo with the macro lens attached, and a photo with the micro lens attached.

I need to experiment more with them, trying to get better results (and I usually don’t shoot macro :)), and if I get some good ones, you will see them on this blog.

Overall

Blips are an interesting product. I don’t think the goal here is to get a pro level macro shots, but more about having fun with a new stile of photography, without having to buy a very pricey macro lens. You can find out more about blips on the Smartmicrooptics website.

Few months ago, I posted here a review of the LENSKIRT. For those unfamiliar, LENSKIRT is a shade one uses to take photos through glass (examples in the review).

In the review, I explain that while LENSKIRT works well, I felt disappointed with the quality and the way it was put together. And it seem I was not the only one. Few weeks ago, I was contacted by the makers of LENSKIRT and they offered to send me a new, updated version, which addressed these issues. And since it arrived last week, today I will take a look and how they succeed with it.

Update

On first look there is not much change. The way the LENSKIRT works stayed the same, and it also looks the same. It’s hard to say if the materials changed, but the front material feels a tiny bit thinner, while the back material feels thicker. Where I before complained about the materials feeling cheap, now they are much better, and I have more confidence in them lasting longer.

The biggest difference is in the way the pieces of the LENSKIRT are put together. This updated one, was properly aligned, the logo was stitched in properly and also all the connections are now very clean and you don’t see the inside of the material. It’s a total 180 in quality compared to the previous one. Here you have comparison photos of the old and the new one. You can easily see the change. The suction cups are also a tiny bit different, but I have not noticed any change in usage.

New version, nicely stitched

Old version, horribly stitched

New version, straight logo

Old version, crooked logo

Conclusion Update

It’s really nice to see that LENSKIRT corrected all the problems I had with the previous version. Now it works as it should and also has the build quality one would expect. It now makes it so much easier to recommend. So as I stated before, if you know you will take photos through glass, you should get one.

Last week Topaz released and update to one of the plug-ins from their popular collection, the Topaz Impession, and today, I will take a look at it.

What is it for?

Topaz Impression changes your photos into paintings, by simulating brush strokes. It provides many (over 150) presets for different styles and also gives you access to huge amounts of settings, so you can further tweak the look you are going for.

How does it look?

It’s really hard not to be impressed by the results. If I did not know, you could easily fool mi with the results, claiming that they are paintings. I especially liked the impressionistic presets, that provide just wonderful one click results.

For each preset, you can also go into the settings and tweak many attributes. From the size and shape of the brushes, to color tones, textures, lights and more. It’s not always easy to tell what will result from a specific change, but exploring is part of the fun here.

Usability & Performance

Again, it’s hard to not be impressed by the speed of this software. Switching between presets takes a second (it get slower by huge photos, but one should expect that :)) and changes in settings take effect almost immediately. This really makes experimenting that much more enjoyable. The interface is very simple, similar to other plug-ins from topaz, with the presets being the center element here. You just select the one you like the most, and than just tweak the result a bit.

The quality of the result is really nice, with the brushes being high enough resolution, that it looks great even when zoomed in.

Conclusion

While the results are impressive, there is a question, where you would use something like this. For me, the usability is very limited, as I tend to go more toward realism. But if you want to put a more artistic touch to your photos, or you have a client that would be interested in something like this, you should really give it a try. For more info and a trial version, head over to the Topaz Impresion 2 webpage here. (btw. there is also currently a introductory price with a 40% discount available, the code is on the Topaz website)

I have been using the Canon 17mm F4 TSE a lot during the last weeks, and today I will share with you my thoughts about it. Even if it’s an older lens, it’s not so widely used, so not many articles about it around. So I’m adding this one to the pile :)

What is a tilt-shift lens used for?

A tilt shift lens can do two thing, as it’s already obvious from the name. The lens can tilt the front element either up or down or left to right, and it can also shift the front up and down or left to right. This is used for following:

1. change the focal plane using tilting to get a bigger DOF – if you have something close that you want to have sharp, you can use tilt to change the focal plane to include more in the DOF of you photos. Focal plane is the plane where you are focused, around which everything is in focus. And by tilting the lens, you are tilting this plane.

2. change the focal plane using tilting for selective DOF – you can use it also in opposite way, to get much smaller DOF or to get parts of the photo completely out of focus. This is the co called tilt-shift or miniature effect.

3. shift the lens to correct perspective distortion – perspective distortion appears when your camera is not perfectly leveled. But sometimes you need to capture something that is above or below your view, so you would need to tilt your camera, which will create perspective distortion. Instead, with this lens, you can shit up or down, while keeping the lens leveled, to capture what you need, without any distortion.

4. easy panorama or vertoramas – since shifting greatly extends what you can capture, you can easily create panorama and vertoramas from the shifted images.

I will do a bigger guide sometimes later, specific for each usage.

Picture quality

As it’s a manual focus prime lens, it create some crazy sharp results. On the other hand, it’s very easy to catch lens flares due to the bulbous front element, and also light leaks, due to the mechanism being not completely tight. Here are some examples of how it can look like:

The is no lens hood for this lens, but most of the time you can just shade it with your hand, or use something to cover the lens by longer exposures, to get rid them.

There is not much distortion when you shift along the shorter side, but there is bit more when shifted along the longer one (not really surprising). Especially when there is something far away in the distance, it will look a bit squashed at the extremes. I was a bit surprised that when you for instance shift down, it also shifts a tiny bit to the right (and opposite) so the photos don’t align perfectly. But the difference is very small, and one does not loose much .

Build

It’s a Canon L lens, so a great build quality is there. The shift and tilts are smooth and are easy to manipulate. The knobs could be a bit bigger, but maybe it’s better they are not. I already had to change how I attach the L-brackets to my camera and the tripod attachment, as both interfered with the rotation of the lens. But this is due to me using a Sony with a Metabones adapter, and since the tripod mount is on the adapter, it’s close to the lens as it would normally be.

Usage

This lens just gives you such a new view, and more freedom in composition. I had not much use for the tilt function, as with such a wide lens, the DOF is mostly big enough. But what got me the most is how easy is to make panoramas. No need for special tripod heads, no need to worry about distortion, you just shift, take the shots and you are done. It’s just so fast and easy.

One does have to be very careful with the lens, as there is nothing protecting the front. So no running with it :) Also the lens flares can create problems, but one can actually take a photo, shift the lens thereby avoiding the flare, take another photo, and then just blend it into the first shot. Especially in panoramas, you get quite a huge overlap when you use the whole range with three shots, so there is space for corrections.

This is really a wonderful lens. It maybe a bit more specialized, especially for architecture and landscapes, but it really a lot of fun to use. If you can try out a tilt-shift lens, you really should :)

Sharing images

All images are shared under Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-derivatieves, Non-Commercial. Feel free to use images non-commercialy on your blog, facebook, pinterest and similar but link to www.hdrshooter.com and give credit to me, Miroslav Petrasko, as the author.